Now, now, America. Don't go overboard. Again.
More than half a million folks' names and phone numbers, plus other sensitive files, were accidentally spilled onto the internet by a misconfigured server operated by the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, it is claimed.
That fund is a Republican super PAC that campaigned in the …

Re: I wonder ...

Probably Irrelevant

Buried in the news recently was an article about a criminal being busted for identity fraud using information from a database managed by (I think) Experian which will disgorge the necessary information on anyone in the US on request. As a private individual you need to spring for the $1500 a year subscription cost -- law enforcement and government subs are free. The company claims it does background checks on all subscriptions but since they're sold to outfits like debt collection agencies that might have less than honest employees this is probably moot.

Re: All of them, eh?

Re: All of them, eh?

Dennis Skinner is a lot closer to real power than you ever will be. He is an elected MP and he sits in the same room as the leader of parliament. He gets to do a lot of stuff locally and at least gets his voice heard nationally which is way better than a misanthropic voice in a marginal tech site commentary. Disenfranchising yourself is the lowest level you can sink to in an organized society, morally and effectually. The worst among the powers that be will seek perpetually to disenfranchise this or that group - look at what the Republican party is doing in individual states in the USA - why would you want to do what those in charge of you want you to do (ie to not vote)? The ultimate disobedience is to be politically active and vote, vote, vote!

Re: All of them, eh?

Welcome to the modern world of the UK and US, where cynicism is the best way to stay sane and your vote doesn't matter. Live in a primarily blue constituency but dislike blue? Your vote doesn't matter. Live in a red constituency but dislike red? Your vote doesn't matter. Central Manchester or Montana; Cambridge or California, your vote doesn't matter.

The future's bright. You'll die eventually and not have to worry about this crap anymore.

In the Netherlands there are about 13 political party's to choose from. More choice means that you can vote for the party you most believe in, and there are party's with a high moral standard among them. There are strict rules regarding campaign contributions which prevents conflict of interest.

Also there isn't one party who gets a majority, but multiple party's have to work together. Which means that in practice multiple party's achieve some of their goals and not just the largest one. The opposition can still propose laws and they can still get the accepted if they receive the majority of votes.

I assume that in America with only 2 choices, chances are quite large that at some point there just isn't a party to your liking..

Although at first the large number of parties in NL and the fact that you always need a coalition might seem a recipe for chaos, it does seem to work quite well. One of the advantages is that there is more consensus within each party, fringe elements can move to another party.

A few weeks ago Mrs H (recently arrived in NL) and I watched the presentation of the budget. What stuck us is the modesty of the politicians, a welcome absence of selfaggrandisement. Specifically the Minister of Finance started his speech by praising prudence, he then mentioned that the economy is doing well but that this wasn't just due to their hard work but also that of previous governments and the world economy doing better. And it seems that NL is one of the few countries to run a budget surplus and paying off the national debt. Guess Mrs H and I will be staying here for a bit longer.

So you did exactly what they wanted, in a democracy the politicians should be afraid of the voters - not the other way around. To paraphrase Brendan Behan, "I have never seen a situation so dismal that a blogger couldn't make it worse."

Nah...

In almost any practical democracy today the politicians are exactly as afraid of the voters and their choices as mobile carriers are terrified about you moving to one of the other ones due their abysmal customer service. Except of course all of them are exactly equally shitty and they know that you know that.

Re: New list for HR-filtering your resume/CV

Ah yes, the cloudy equivalent of "chmod -R 777 *", no doubt. Although you'd have be dumb as a tree stump to screw up S3 perms like that, as long as you bothered to read the doc. Of course I suppose those involved with that PAC are probably not big on reading. Karma for mouth breathers (or those that pander to them).

as long as you bothered to read the doc

Haven't you got the memo? People haven't read the docs for just about anything for a long time now. ESPECIALLY the kind of folks that put data like this on a service like S3.

As someone who has been told they write awesome documentation time and time again I can't even begin to count the times when someone asked me "what about X?" only to point them to documentation (that is easily searchable) written (usually) years earlier. I could understand "I browsed document X but it was last updated in 2014 is the info still valid?" kind of questions.

Tea Party hypocrisy

The Tea Party? That will be the same people who chanted "Lock her up" about Hilary Clinton's alleged weak email security. I expect they will now all be out on the streets chanting for Tea Party officials to be locked up too?

Re: Tea Party hypocrisy

Well, Hilary didn't get locked up, so why would these guys? It's not like it was Confidential, Secret or Top Secret info, right?

Quite right, she didn't get locked up, just like you didn't read the OP's post properly. There was no mention there of Democrats chanting for the TP people to be locked up, their point was that by their own 'logic', those same people should now be chanting to lock themselves up.

Disclaimer - before you start categorising me as an enemy voter, I'm not a supporter of any US political party, I'm not even left-pondian, but I am perfectly able to observe and comment upon the idiocy on display there.

Read the article, this time actually read it`

Read the article - this time, actually READ it. "an outfit called L2 Political" caused the leakage. They are hired out by whomever can pay their fees. The article says that "That same organization worked on Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign". So all the commentards who are blasting right-wingers can now get going and bash left-wing looney Obama lovers too.

A Tea Party member might think that the moral of this article is, "Don't hire an outfit that pandered to that left-winger Obama in the past." That's not the point of the article. To me, the moral is, "Keep an eye on who you subcontract, they could be lax with data security." That's well within the IT angle.